A reader writes:
I was just reading http://www.jimmyakin.org/2005/01/attention_cold_.html, and thought about the preparations the New Zealand government has made for a Bird Flu outbreak. One of the precautions is to ban all public meetings.
How would this effect the moral requirement of mass attendance?
There are two dimensions to this question.
The first is the question of whether a potential global pandemic really will be furthered–in a particular area–by attending Mass.
If the answer to that question is "yes" then, regardless of what the civil government says, one is not obliged to go to Mass. In fact, one would be positivley obliged NOT to go. If there is a significant risk (as opposed to a trivial risk) that one will contract or transmit a potentially fatal illness then one simply should not be going to Mass until the danger is past.
The second question is what impact civil laws against public gatherings have on this question.
If the civil law is reasonable the one is not obliged to go–but then that already would be the case since one is not obliged to go if there is a significant risk of disease transmission.
What if the civil law is unreasonable? What if the civil government has flown off the handle and wildly overestimated the danger (and you know this because you are a supergenius doctor specializing in the communicability of bird flu).
In that case, it depends on HOW unreasonable the civil law is.
If you’re going to be fined a penny if you get caught attending–and if a penny is a trivial sum of money to you–then you would not be excused from your Sunday obligation because the penalty of a penny is trivial to you and trivial reasons do not excuse one from Mass.
On the other hand, if getting caught has more serious consequences (e.g., substantial fines, jail time, a criminal record that could harm your ability to get a job) then you definitely WOULD be excused–not in this case because of the bird flu risk (the law is unreasonable, remember?) but because the law itself creates a hardship in going to Mass that is sufficient to excuse one from the Sunday obligation.
In the latter case, the situation is similar to that of lands where the Church is persecuted and Christians face hardship if they attend Mass. In those situations Christians are not bound to attend (though doing so can be meritorious, even heroically so). If your government is behaving irrationally by prohibiting public gatherings in disproportion to the risk then you similarly are excused if you face a non-trivial penalty for attendance.
I don’t know what the bird flu situation is in New Zealand, or whether the government there really has banned public meetings, but flu pandemics can be EXTREMELY deadly, and I’m inclined to cut the government slack and err on the side of caution in preventing anything that could cause MILLIONS of deaths worldwide.
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